INDIANAPOLIS — A deeply damaging 30-year battle for the control of top-level American open-wheel racing came to an end Feb. 22 when the Indy Racing League reached an agreement in principle to take over the Champ Car World Series.
During that three-decade span, what has generically become known as Indy-car racing was at times more popular than NASCAR and by the mid-1990s, it even began to rival Formula One on the world stage. But a renewal of the initial conflict over the leadership of the sport, sparked by the formation of the IRL in 1994, threw American open-wheel racing into a precipitous decline to the point where it no longer resonated with casual fans.
From 1956 to 1978, the Indianapolis 500 and the other races in the American open-wheel national championship were sanctioned by the United States Auto Club. Founded out of necessity when the American Automobile Ass’n pulled out of auto racing in the wake of the 1955 Le Mans tragedy, USAC was the brainchild of Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner Tony Hulman and the club operated in lockstep with IMS until Hulman’s death in October 1977.
Several teams were unhappy with USAC’s lack of a commitment to a year-long series of races and extreme emphasis on the Indianapolis 500. 
They were galvanized into action by a ‘white paper’ written by racing legend (and Indy car team owner) Dan Gurney which advocated forming an owner’s group similar to the Formula One Constructors Ass’n. 
Gurney, along with Roger Penske, U.E. ‘Pat’ Patrick and several other team owners formed Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) in the summer of 1978. When CART’s petition to make a number of changes involving series structure, purses, and engine rules was unanimously rejected by the USAC board on November 18, 1978, the CART-USAC war was on.
USAC and CART both staged a series of open-wheel races with similar rules in 1979. Rick Mears won the inaugural 10-race CART title while A.J. Foyt, who controversially abandoned CART at the 11th hour, took the seven-round USAC honors. The drama climaxed at Indianapolis, where USAC claimed the CART teams were “not in good standing” and denied entry. A Federal judge cleared the way, but then a cheating scandal resulted in 11 bumped competitors getting an additional qualification run the day before the race and 35 cars, not the traditional 33, took the green flag.
Other than Foyt, all of the top drivers of the era (including Al and Bobby Unser, Mario Andretti, Johnny Rutherford and Gordon Johncock) went with their teams to CART. For the 1980 season, John Cooper, the new IMS president, briefly created a unified series known as the Championship Racing League. But that disbanded by midseason and CART took over as the primary sanctioning body of the formula, operating it as the PPG IndyCar World Series.
Crucially, USAC maintained the sanction of the Indianapolis 500, though it was a points-paying round of the CART championship and those teams made up the majority of the field throughout the 1980s and into the ’90s. During that era, the sport underwent some major changes. The cars became safer, but much more technically sophisticated and quite a bit more expensive. Offsetting those rising costs were a cadre of blue-chip corporate sponsors, including Marlboro, Valvoline, Budweiser, Miller, Texaco, Target and Kmart.
The big money came in the form of manufacturer involvement. Chevrolet paid a nominal fee to badge Ilmor Engineering’s successful competitor to the dominating Cosworth DFX engine, and Cosworth’s subsequent XB engine enjoyed significant support from Ford. Mercedes-Benz took over as Ilmor’s technical partner, and Honda and Toyota mounted full-fledged factory efforts in the mid 1990s.
The complexion of the racing changed in the 1980s as well. The death of the SCCA’s Can Am series in 1983 brought an influx of teams and road-racing venues into the CART series. Many of the American heroes reached the end of their careers and retired at the dawn of the ’90s and the majority of the drivers coming into the series were foreign-born road racers.
Yet CART’s popularity continued to grow into the 1990s, as measured by race attendance, television ratings and sponsorship dollars. The formula arguably peaked from 1993 to 1995, when championships were won by the contemporary F-1 champion (Nigel Mansell), a second-generation American hero (Al Unser, Jr.) and a rising star on his way  to F-1 (Jacques Villeneuve). Even when George’s IRL went into direct competition with the CART series in 1996, the renamed FedEx Championship Series remained comparatively strong into the late 1990s.
While under Andrew Craig’s leadership in 1998, CART raised almost $100 million in an Initial Public Offering. The product being sold was the teams — franchises including Penske Racing, Team Green, Ganassi Racing, Newman-Haas Racing.
Ultimately, confusion about its identity is what defeated CART in the market place. Stripped of the Indianapolis association, sponsorship became harder to sell and a push toward an international schedule failed to produce results. Chip Ganassi was the first CART team owner to return to the Indy 500, winning the 2000 race easily with driver  Juan Montoya. Penske Racing followed up with another Indy win a year later and switched full-time to the IRL in 2002.
At the turn of the century, the CART team owners were unable to agree on a new engine formula. Fed up with the politicking, Toyota moved to the IRL, followed by Honda, which lost trust in CART after an unfavorable ruling about pop-off valves that came to a head at the 2001 Detroit Grand Prix. When Toyota and Honda left, they took most of the top teams with them, and by 2004, the IRL grid looked like the CART grid of the mid-90s.
With most of the field gone, CART burned through its $100 million war chest subsidizing teams and the company went bankrupt at the end of 2003. At a federal bankruptcy auction on Jan. 28, 2004, a group led by Kevin Kalkhoven and Gerald Forsythe acquired CART’s key assets and pledged to continue as the Champ Car World Series.
From 2004-2006, Champ Car operated as a spec formula using a Lola chassis and Ford-Cosworth engines. As part of their overall strategy for the series, Forsythe and Kalkhoven acquired Cosworth Engineering as well as the rights to operate flagship races in Long Beach, California, and Toronto, Canada. A new American-made Panoz chassis was introduced in 2007.
The Champ Car World Series continued in competition with the IRL for four years, struggling to maintain an 18-car field and suffering from bad publicity in the wake of a series of cancelled races. Throughout Kalkhoven and Forsythe’s ownership of the series, Kalkhoven maintained an open dialogue with George and there were several failed attempts at unification.
With the IRL also facing a car count crisis in 2008, the time was finally right for both sides to reach an agreement. Now that the sport is once again under the leadership of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, it remains to be seen if open-wheel racing can reach the popularity it enjoyed in its heyday.